Spam plagues our Inbox each day. Emails advertising Rolex watches, penis enlargements, viagra and emails from Nigeria offering me vast amounts of money for doing nothing, are all very annoying, but we are able to get rid of most of them automatically.

Email servers often have spam protection built in. These cull the majority of spam, but they have to allow a fair chunk of spam through so as to not restrict legitimate emails. Sometimes if they are unsure, they may add a spam tag to the subject. It is scary looking at server stats, just how much is stopped at the server level.

In our email client we are able to setup rules to remove the majority of remaining spam from our Inbox. I regularly find myself doing this on computers where I work and have found this method to be very reliable.

This article will show you how to setup basic email rules which will check mail as it is received. The rules will look for keywords in the body and the subject of you emails to decide if they are spam or not. We are then able to move these filtered emails to a folder of our choice.

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Port Forwarding allows you to access computers behind a router, for various services. To put it another way, Port Forwarding offers you access to computers on your home network accessible from anywhere.

Eg, You may want to setup one of your home computers as a web server. If you have not set up port forwarding, typing in your home IP address into a browser will bring up the router settings. You will need to setup your router to send webpage requests to the computer that will be hosting the site. This is known as port forwarding and it is a supported feature for most routers. Without port forwarding you can’t move beyond the router, restricting you access to all of the computers on the network. 

I have found over the years, my needs for port forwarding have been limited to only a few simple tasks. I set up a web server and an ftp server on one machine. I also needed to have access to a remote desktop connection from another machine. This was easy to setup and allowed me to take my home computers with me on the road.

Once you have access to remote desktop on one machine, you have freedom to access shared network drives from within your home network. There is nothing that you are unable to access. It is as if you were at home, on your home computer.

This article will show you how to configure your router so that you can access computers on your home network, from any computer that is outside of your network. This article is designed for newcomers to Port Forwarding, meaning that there is lots of technical stuff left out.

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This week, while I was playing with a new word processor program, I was reminded of Microsoft Word - in particular how in-grained it has become in day to day computing. It seems that any word processor that dares to come onto the market these days must inevitably be reviewed in light of how it compares to MS Word, and more importantly, it must be able to import & export MS Word’s native ‘doc’ format.

Every now & then you may receive the occasional doc file from people at your work or in your home email box. The normal course of action would be to open it with Microsoft Word – if you have it.

I’m one of those people who doesn’t, for the simple reason that, while I could buy a copy of Microsoft Office and be done with it, I barely have use for 90-odd percent of Microsoft Office’s feature set (everything but the kitchen sink, it seems) so I can’t really justify spending the kind of money that Microsoft are asking, just to open a few files. So what solutions are there for a guy like me?

Read on for an Inspect My Gadget investigation…

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A Keyboard/Video/Mouse(KVM) switch lets you use the same keyboard, mouse and monitor to control multiple computers. This helps you save desk space and money as you can use the same peripherals to control and view each of the computers you connect.

If you have a dual screen setup, and you would like to connect multiple computers up to your monitors, people will tell you to spend a large amount of money to get a KVM switch which will handle this. 

For a dual screen KVM switch which you can connect 4 computers, you are looking at spending around $500 and you are also likely to have to spend additional money on the cables, and these can cost more than the switch itself. It is almost worth purchasing extra monitors and peripherals to control your computers, instead of buying one of the really fancy switches.

This article will show you a cheaper option to achieve the same result. Halving the cost comes with the most minor of drawbacks:

• Switching can no longer be done through the keyboard (still works for one screen).
• To switch computers, you will need to press two buttons instead of one.

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There are a number of things that Windows Mobile devices are good for. I see a lot of people carrying around many devices with them such as iPods, cameras, GPS receivers and phones. Why bother when we can have all these devices packed into one neat unit that fits inside your pocket, allowing you to do more than all of the above gadgets combined.

I did not know the full power of my device when I first got it. My old Pocket PC was stolen and did not incorporate a phone so when insurance time came around, it was nice to be updated with a Ipaq rw6828.

This device has allowed me to experience Windows Mobile to its full potential and really find out what it can do for me in day to day life.

I have put together a list of features that you are able to use on your device. Many you already know about but it is nice to have them in one place and encourage non Windows Mobile users to make the leap, showing why Windows Mobile devices have advantages over other phone operating systems.

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